Sherlock Holmes has been an obsession of mine since adolescence. When I came across this relatively expensive set of books in junior high school, I ran home and did every chore in the world in my entire neighborhood for three straight days --and added up the dimes and quarters people would give me until I had enough to buy these two volumes. They have been with me ever since. For the first time, I understood what all those words were that I couldn't find in a dictionary, with illustrations and explanations. Even more amazing, I learned that Sherlock Holmes was a real person -- or at least, the editors of these books believed so! The product of a great generation of Holmes fanatics, this collection is full of the arguments over what each story means, what has been included by Dr. Watson, and what must have been left out to protect the innocent. The one truly indispensable volume for Holmes fans, "The Annotated Sherlock Holmes" is an unadulterated joy!

If you ever wanted to read the entire Sherlock Holmes canon, this is the best book to buy. Also, if you are one of those Sherlock fans, you will certainly appreciate this book. Apart from Conan Doyle's original text, this book presents lots of interesting information about Victorian England, linking it with the text. If Holmes spends a crown on something, Baring-Gould will not only calculate its value today but will also show you a picture of the coins at that time. If Holmes and Dr. Watson have to take a transportation to go somewhere, Baring-Gould will show a picture and description of the exact transportation they used. Finally, if the two inseparable friends have to investigate something in a specific address, the book shows a map or picture of the site. However, the book most interesting quality is an extensive research the editor made in order to sort the stories chronologically, not in the order Conan Doyle wrote them but in the order they in fact happened. All those details make the book so real that after you finish this book, you will get a strange feeling that the most famous fictitious detective in the world really lived at 221b Baker Street or a strange feeling that Holmes was not simply a delusion of Dr. Watson, himself the alter ego of Conan Doyle.

the knowledge of when to stop." Thus remarks Holmes to Lestrade about the villainous Jonas Oldacre

( By the bye giving an excellent piece of advice to all artists, villainous or not. Truly the stage, as Watson keeps reminding us, lost a great actor when Holmes embarked upon the profession of consulting detective )

It would appear that Jonas, in his attempt to send the innocent John Hector Mc Farlane to the gallows, could not resist adding a final touch which brought his nefarious plans crashing down---he planted a stain of blood on the wall upon which Mc Farlane's fingerprint would be found!

Lestrade: "You are aware that no two thumb-marks are alike ? "
Holmes: "I have heard something of the kind. "

Whereupon Wiliaim S Baring-Gould, greatest of Holmseian addict/scholars treats us to a footnote on the margin regarding Galton's method of fingerprining, given to the British Association in 1899 and concludes that--

By my gold amethyst encrusted snuff-box, this is fun!

It's the best rendering of Conan Doyle's canon, complete with maps of London, illustrations from Collier's, vintage 1903; coats of arms, photographs, drawings--in brief, the world of S.H. made explicable, and vivid.

Naturally you knew that when Watson informs us that their long suffering landlady, Mrs.Hudson, lived on the first floor flat, he's using it in the English sense: what we Americans would call 'the second floor.' Or that a 'life preserver' was a short bludgeon, usually of flexible cane, whalebone, or the like loaded with lead at one end. Or that---

Hmm...now what was that about the supreme gift of the artist?

I first read Baring-Gould's biography back in 1975, and it was my first REAL exposure to The Game -- the treatment of Sherlock Holmes as a living person and the art of speculating about The Master's life from the clues dropped by Watson in the original stories. I'm delighted that this book is still available.

Baring-Gould presents as good a chronology of the Doyle tales as anyone, and he "fills in the blanks" delightfully. (Imagine Holmes fighting a prehistoric bird in hand-to-talon combat on the deck of a freighter! It's true!!)

Baring-Gould obviously had a damn good time writing this extraordinary, and definitive, biography of Sherlock. And if you've already devoured the original 60 stories, dive into this book. Then set it alongside your copies of the Doyle books. It deserves a place there.

Baring-Gould is the greatest chronicler of the Holmesian canon. His annotated version is a must for every enthusiast. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street is the biography of the man, put together from the many stories. "It was the year in which Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden...."."Unaccountably, the Almanac fails to list perhaps the most memorable event of that same memorable year. It was the birth, in the early hours of the morning of Friday, January 6, of a third and last son to Siger and Violet Holmes, at the farmstead of Mycroft in the North Riding of Yorkshire, England, a district famous for its horse-breeding stables and its wind-swept--"wuthering" - heights." You will read about the birth of the man, his family, his brother, etc. You will enter with him into his friendship with Watson (also Watson's youth) and their adventures. Please bring this book back in print. It is a must.

W.S. Baring-Gould's classic biography of Holmes is brilliant from start to finish. Arguably the greatest Sherlockian scholar ever, Baring-Gould assembles the details of Holmes's life from isolated references in the canonical stories and indulges himself in some inferential reasoning as to some of the missing information: he contends, for example, that a certain well-known U.S. consulting detective is actually the child of Holmes and Irene Adler. (Some of his speculations on other matters have been borne out by the discovery of a lost manuscript published by Nicholas Meyer under the title _The Seven Per Cent Solution_.)

Readers of this work will also want to find a copy of Baring-Gould's masterly _The Annotated Sherlock Holmes_ if possible. These kids writing Holmes pastiches today just don't know what the hell they're doing :-).

Doyle's condensed version of the French Revolution is an excellent source for revisiting this period in history. Having majored in French Language 20 years ago, I am embarassed to admit both of how much I had forgotten and did not know of this event. Doyle's book is a wonderful work outlining the chronolgy, revealing the hows and whys, and most importantly discussing its value today. Its 135 pages are worth their weight in gold.

The French Revolution is one of the most significant events in world history. So much has been written about it that it can be difficult to find a good place to start exploring the subject. Well, look no more. William Doyle has written a terrific introduction to the topic that is wonderful in its scope and yet concise. In this book he is more concerned with why the French Revolution mattered and has continued to matter, that with a retelling of what happened.

Rather than a strict chronological approach, the six chapters of this book give the reader six different perspectives on the same event. Each adds depth to our understanding of the event and its place in history.

Chapter one is called "Echoes" and it relates how this great upheaval was perceived by the rest of the world not only in the newspapers of the day but in fiction and drama. The Importance of Being Earnest, A Tale of Two Cities, and The Scarlet Pimpernel are discussed. The complete text of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens is included in this chapter as well.

"Why It Happened" is the second chapter. Here the author discusses the causes of the Revolution. This is mainly a description of the Ancien Regime's government and society during the reign of Louis XVI.

The third chapter is called "How It Happened." In this chapter Doyle discusses the Revolution as a series of events that stretched over a number of years. He does an excellent job of showing how each event led to the next. The violent excesses of the guillotine are much more understandable in context.

"What It Ended" is the name of the fourth chapter and my personal favorite. It is here that we see the impact that the Revolution had, not only in France, but throughout the world. Before the Revolution there is a world of Divine Right, religious authority, slavery, peasants, and aristocracy. While this doesn't change overnight, the fact that the people can revolt and change the social order becomes established beyond a doubt. Once changed, society seems unwilling to go back and is changed forever.

The next to the last chapter is called "What It Started," and it deals with the effects the Revolution has had on the world. It also discusses the reaction to the Revolution and the dynamic tension of radical and conservative forces in modern history.

"Where It Stands" is the last chapter. This is devoted to the schools of academic thought on the Revolution. The "classic" interpretation of the Revolution and its critics are outlined with a brief history. The chapter ends with an outline of contemporary thinking about the Revolution.

The book ends with a Timeline, The Revolutionary Calendar, a list of Further Readings, and an Index. The Calendar of twelve 30-day months and five complimentary days that began on September 22, 1793 is especially interesting.

This is a great introduction into the events and meaning of the French Revolution. It will satisfy the reader who wants just one book on the topic as well as the beginning scholar who is looking for a place to start his or her research.

Many relatively recent books on the French Revolution, such as Simon Schama's excellent CITIZENS, seem to presuppose a basic knowledge of the highlights and terms of the Revolution itself (the Tennis Court Oath, the Jacobins, Thermidor, etc.) but also of its aftermath (Louis XVIII and Charles X, Napoleon;s Egypt campaign, etc.). Doyle's book presupposes almost nothing, and lays out for the common reader not only a very clear and concise of the Revolution itself but also the ancien regime that preceded, and the restorations, republics, and empires that succeeded it. Best of all, it makes interesting claims in its introduction and conclusion as to why the Revolution mattered to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an intellectual and political event, and even (for good measure) a coherent account of the battles raging among the Annales schools of historians in France up to the present day. Fine work, and a great introduction.

Originally Broadcast On the CBC during 1968
Sherlock Holmes- Henry Comor, Dr. Watson- Gerard Parkes, Barrymore-Gillie Fenwick,
Heed the Baskerville family legend of the Hound: avoid the moors in those hours of the night when the powers of evil are exalted. Every Baskerville that has lived in the family home since the Legend began has met with a violent death. Dr. Mortimer writes to the one man that can help him, Sherlock Holmes, to exorcise the "Legend of the Hound" that plagues the Baskervilles. This radio adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's masterpiece traces Sherlock Holmes' adventure of superstition and revenge on the barren, gloomy moors in this thrilling mystery.

The first in Scenario Productions' "The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes" series and taken from the Archives of CBC Radio, this superbly presented radio adventure theater production of The Hound Of The Baskervilles is a multicast presentation of a classic Sherlock Holmes story. This two audio cassette audio book has a two hour running time and is enhanced with music and sound effects for the perfect "theater of the mind" listening experience. This radio theater production of The Hound Of The Baskervilles is enthusiastically recommended for all Sherlock Holmes fans and would make a very popular addition to school and community library audio book collections.

"The Hound of the Baskervilles" ranks as the most famous and also the best of the four Sherlock Holmes novels. It is the first Holmes novel I read as a child, and the combination of ancient curse, foreboding moor, and modern danger kept me turning the pages.

The BBC has once again done a masterful job of adapting the novel to the format of radio drama. When I first stumbled on to the BBC Holmes series, I thought Clive Merrison to be a scandalous over-actor, but going back and rereading some of the Holmes stories for the first time in decades shows that Merrison, of all the portrayers of Holmes, just might have gotten the oddball genius most nearly right. Holmes had a histrionic streak which caused him to keep his deductions secret until he could reveal them in the most sensational fashion possible, and Merrison captures this quirk of Holmes' character perfectly.

"The Hound" is unique among the Holmes novels because for a large part of the mystery, Holmes' character is offstage, appearing only at the last moment to bring events to a hair-raising denouement. Holmes' joint penchants for secrecy and sensation almost bring his client to grief, but all's well that ends well. This radio play begins, continues, and ends very well.

This really is an excellent book, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best known for Sherlock Holmes, of course, but he was also an excellent science fiction author of his time, up there with Wells, Verne and the rest, and a wonderful writer in general. The Poison Belt starts off rather humorously then become intense, sad, and joyful in turn. Professor Challenger is another larger than life character, and he is also Doyle's favorite creation, not Holmes. I enjoy the Sherlock Holmes books, but I really do like Doyle's underrated sci-fi better.

This is an excellent book creating suspense as our solar system passes through a poision belt in the cosmic web and explains beautifully the effects of a supposed poisen on our solar system. The Reader of this book will wonder that has Sir ever been an attendent of Dr. Einstein or Sir has himself teleported himself to the Deep Space and visualised the passing of 9 planets into etheral poisen.

William Doyle brilliantly recreates a little remembered incident that challenged America to its core: the attempt of an Air Force veteran named James Meredith to exercise his right to go to school. That would, on the surface, seem an easy task. However the year was 1962, the school was the University Of Mississippi, and the citizen was African American. The battle which took place left an armed force occupying an American campus, two people dead, and a nation facing the inevitable moral conflict brought about by segregation.

Doyle's research is superb; he uncovers evidence, testimony, and events which have never before been reported. At the same time, the writing is crisp, exciting and momentous - events race along spinning out of the control of the racist Governor (Ross Barnett), the vacillating President (John Kennedy) and the cool observer (Meredith himself)

Readers wanting to know more about the Civil Rights Movement, human courage, and the Kennedy Administration will, naturally, find this book to be fascinating. However, any citizen who wants an exciting read about the history of their nation should buy this remarkable book.

British artist Richard Doyle (1824-1883), the son of a portrait painter and caricaturist, may be best remembered by some as the creator of the cover design for Punch, which was used for over a century. He also illustrated a number of children's books and created beguiling paintings of fairies, the wee folk. It is the latter that is used to illustrate this lovely keepsake volume.

Doyle's paintings are imaginative and incandescent, luminous illustrations of fairies astride snails, perched on a beetle or relaxing on a verdant hillock. Each illustration perfectly accompanies a poem, such as a tiny one sipping from a cowslip's bell in Shakespeare's "Ariel's Song" or fairies engaged in a tug-of-war with a grasshopper in "An Explanation of the Grasshopper" by Vachel Lindsay.

Other poets represented include John Keats, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Butler Yeats, and Langton Hughes.

The pairing of art and poetry is superb, thoughtfully conceived and executed. This slim volume deserves a place in everyone's library.

- Gail Cooke

This is a well-researched work that's easy to recommend. Doyle is an excellent historian who is well-versed in Faulkner.
The combination makes this fine book both an interesting history of Faulkner's native "postage stamp of soil" and an excellent introduction to Faulkner's world. It also provides a wonderful example of what a historian actually does (although not without some cautions along the way).

This book took me weeks to read, not because it was dull but because the copious footnotes at the end of each of the 14 excellent essays demanded investigation. The essays complement one another to present a more complete and cogent view of the antecedents and realities of the counterculture than any other volume I have yet seen on the subject.

Counterculture names, say Braunstein and Doyle, "...hippies, freaks, Flower Children, urban guerillas, orphans of Amerikka - underscores the degree to which Sixties cultural radicals had a revolving-door approach to identity, appropriating and shedding roles and personas at a dizzying pace." In these pages, the roles and personas in cultural politics, race, sex, the media (especially music, film and fashion), drugs, feminism, environmentalism and alternative visions of community and technology are thoroughly investigated.

"Unlike subcultures," says Marilyn Young in the foreword, "...a contraculture aspires to transform values and mores of its host culture. If it is successful...it BECOMES the dominant culture." I don't believe anyone would maintain that the counterculture of the '60s has become dominant, but its influence on our present culture is more vast and all-encompassing than much of the media would have us believe.

"The Sixties were centrally about the recognition on the part of an ever-growing number of Americans, that the country in which they thought they lived - peaceful, generous, honorable - did not exist and never had." The society they found themselves in was instead, "...morally bankrupt, racist, militaristic, and culturally stultifying."

Against the climate of the VietNam war and race riots in the South, these essays note that the era was one of post-scarcity abundance. Intentional poverty was adopted consciously by a generation that was appalled by the waste of human and material resources. They wanted to figure out how to "...live a completely new life as far outside the boundaries of the State and commercial marketplace as they could get." Dropouts could live on the leftovers of this affluent society.

The San Francisco Diggers' motto was "create the condition you describe." Says Doyle, "For the Diggers, the word "free" was as much an imperative as it was an adjective. They realized it with free housing, legal services, a medical clinic, film screenings, concerts, free [open]churches, and free stores with food, clothes and household utensils - all donated and gathered from the surrounding community. The Mime Troupe and other street theater groups drew people in to create "happenings," freaking freely on the streets and in public parks, de-legitimizing violence and racism, while the White Panthers staged a "total assault on the culture." Peacefully.

"If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable," said JFK, and his words reverberate across cultural boundaries today. But hippies didn't WANT to become the next coercive power structure in some kind of psychedelic fascism. They wanted a "free frame of reference."

Braunstein observes that the post-scarcity abundance of the era fueled a new drive toward leisure and play. Against a system of "...lifelong competitiveness, materialism and avarice"...LSD and other mind-expanding drugs "...incapacitated the discriminating faculties of the brain that placed objects and images in hierachcies of value." David Farber adds that LSD and other hallucinogens were used as "...an agent in the production of cultural reorientation...a new set of cultural coordinates."

My only beef with the book is in Philip Deloria's "Counterculture Indians and the New Age" and it's not even a criticism of the essay (which I found among the most brilliant and absorbing) but of scholarly research in general. From personal knowledge, I know that there are egregious errors in what Deloria's sources reported about New Buffalo and Lorian. Scholarly research breaks down when such sources are trusted, and Deloria gives an excellent example of this in the much-repeated death speech of Chief Seattle - who never uttered it. It was written by a white screenwriter from Texas for a 1972 TV script on pollution. Hippies and New Agers reinvented Indians without careful reference to the source. And of course the image became marketable.

"Playing Indian," says Deloria, "...had a tendency to lead one into, rather than out of, contradiction and irony" and "...people are simultaneously granted a platform and rendered voiceless."

In his excellent essay on communes, Timothy Miller notes that they were "...enormously, endlessly diverse." "The ultimate culprit, perhaps, was that sacred American icon, individualism. The time had come, communitarians believed, to give up the endless pursuit of self-interest and begin thinking about the common good. They wanted the country to start moving from I to we. It all added up to a vision of nothing less than a new society. The new communitarians were out to save the world and made no bones about it."

Miller's essay segues nicely into the last - on alternative technolgy, environment and the counterculture by Andrew Kirk. Buckminster Fuller's geodescic domes were used extensively in the Drop City commune in Colorado as well as "...composting toilets, afforadble greenhouses, and organic gardening techniques along with alternative energy technologies." And don't forget that the first computer hackers, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were longhairs who smoked grass.

It's not that there were no mistakes, ineptitudes and downright stupidities in this deliberately unorganized "happening" of the '60s and '70s, but that what was good about it is still good. We're still out there. Here. Hippies didn't disappear and they didn't become corporate CEO's either. Instead, nearly all became teachers, health care workers, artists, organic farmers, social works and the like. "Cultural creatives" of the present, for instance, are either hippies of yesteryear or their heirs in some way.

"They are still out there, well into a third generation, coming together by the tens of thousands once a year at the Rainbow Gatherings. The hallucinogenic age, while tamed in some respects, has survived and mutated and reproduced."

This is the closest thing to the WHOLE STORY" that I've seen yet. Put it on your reference book shelf. ...

'The Valley of Fear'. A real page turner but what makes it most memorable for me is not that Holmes is at his best, but Conan Doyle is. After reading this book I recommend you to read this book because it was a suspense story. The whole story moves around Mcginty who was a big criminal in the valley of vermisa also called the valley of fear. There was only one person who could face to that criminal and his name was Jack McMurdo. He behaved as a gangster and he had taken many risks in his life and he was not afraid to take more risks. Don't miss 'The Valley of Fear'. It's terrifying, exciting, and best of all, real.

I have read all of the Holmes tales many times, and I think this one reigns supreme. I believe that was also Doyle's opinion. It is the finest detective story I have ever read, masterfully composed. The Vermissa Valley section builds to the most shocking moment I've ever experienced in literature.

Not being a Sherlock Holmes fan, I came by the "The Valley of Fear" through a somewhat less traditional route. I was familiar with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's, "The White Company", "Sir Nigel" and "The Adventures of Gerard", but for some inexplicable reason his wonderful mysteries escaped my earlier readings. I aim to remedy the deficiency. For now, this is my first Sherlock Holmes book, and I just couldn't put it down.

Who can really add to all that has been written over the years about this classic? The reader cannot help but be struck with Doyle's writing style. Its economy is a marvel. It is crisp and crackling, not to mention spellbinding. Even a straightforward introduction is masterly handled. Here, for example, is Watson telling us about the crime scene we are about to enter: "....I will.... describe events which occurred before we arrived on the scene by the light of knowledge which came to us afterwards."

Of course Doyle can establish a new scene with the same economy, but turn up the atmospheric temperature a good deal higher. He begins his retrospective "Scowrers" section in the snowbound Gilmerton Mountains, where a single track railroad leads us through a "long, winding tortuous valley," which is part of the "gloomy land of black crag and tangled forest."

This book is really two books woven together by the mysterious history of the central crime victim. The first is set in England, the second in the United States. Keep a sharp ear out for Doyle's deft handling of the King's English and then its transformation into the 19th Century Americanized version. The King's English is all about civility and civilization. In the American tongue, Doyle takes us to the fringes of civilization, to a Western mining town, where cruelty -- not civility -- is the order of the day.

I suppose one could argue that Holmes' deductive reasoning is the ultimate bulwark against chaos and violence. Perhaps for another Sherlock Holmes book. But I can't help but cite one example of Watson's obvious English sense of what is proper. Holmes' companion/narrator takes a stroll in an old-world garden surrounded by ancient yew trees, where he accidentally overhears the murder victim's wife laughing. Worse, she is laughing with her just murdered husband's faithful male companion. As Watson the narrator puts it, "I bowed with a coldness which showed, I dare say, very plainly the impression which had been produced upon my mind......I greeted the lady with reserve. I had grieved with her grief in the dining room. Now I met her appealing gaze with an unresponsive eye." Good ol' Watson!

May I suggest to the reader that, after this classic, you turn to R.L. Stevenson's, "The Master of Ballantrae"? Stevenson's masterpiece also jumps from the old world to the new, and like "The Valley of Fear" the new world for Stevenson also represents murder and mayhem. Something to ponder from these two great Scottish novelists.